


Hummingbird Trapped in a Closed Down Shoe Store

by depressaria



Category: True Blood
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Captivity, Community: hc_bingo, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-09
Updated: 2017-08-06
Packaged: 2018-11-29 14:46:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 19,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11443074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/depressaria/pseuds/depressaria
Summary: He’d thought he was done running when he bought the bar. Had told himself that that was it, that it was time to be a man and make a life in Bon Temps, for better or for worse. And for the most part he did. He lived there for years, nurtured the bar, bought properties, and never considered leaving until Maryann came back for him. But since then, it seemed that every time shit got serious, his first instinct was to hide or run or both. He thought he’d quashed that tendency when he let himself get his heart carved out to stop her, but trapped as he was, it came rushing back like it was never gone.When the Shreveport pack fails to get the information they need from Sam, they don't just let him go.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For the ‘Captivity’ square on my hc_bingo card. Title from Town With No Cheer by Tom Waits. Updating once a week.

He woke up surrounded by the scent of wolves, thick and heavy as a piss-drenched kennel, and the jolt of fear burnt away all the residual grogginess of unconsciousness, leaving him not just awake but tachycardic, teetering on the cusp of panic, and brutally aware of his surroundings. His mouth was full of blood from a split lip and his ribs were threatening to scream bloody murder if he didn’t watch himself, but more pressing was his apparent head injury. When sitting still, it ached ominously, and when he moved it began to pound so furiously that thinking was an impossibility.

His first instinct was to shift and run until he was somewhere safe, but when he tried, his stomach churned and his headache reached a blinding crescendo, until he was forced to give up trying. 

“Fuck,” he said aloud. Then he said it again when he realized that there was a metal band around his neck. Fuck fuck fucking fuck. It was rapidly becoming clear that he was in seriously deep shit, and when he tried to figure out a way to dig his way out, all that came to mind was a vague static-y fog. He couldn’t even properly listen to what was going on around him, his ears were ringing so loudly. 

He was in some sort of cell, that much was immediately apparent. It still smelled like a barn under the stink of the weres, which made it apparent that it had been recently remodeled into a makeshift holding cell, and it seemed sturdy enough that he wouldn’t be able to break through it or even chip away at it. At least, not as a human, but shifting appeared to be a lost cause at that point. 

Makeshift or not, whoever had built it had done a thorough job, and there was no mistaking its intended purpose. There was a bed, which he’d apparently been tossed onto when they locked him in here, and a worn out looking chair, and a toilet, and not much else. The door looked solid, with no weak points that he could see, and when he gingerly got off of the bed and knelt down to investigate, he found that even the slot for food in the door was sealed from the outside. There was a window, but it would be too high up to reach even if he stood on the chair, and it was too narrow to him to fit through anyways. As for the collar, it seemed that he would need specialized tools to get it off. If there’d been a lock, he could have picked it. Eventually. All he would need would be to get a hair pin or something and wait for his head to heal up, and then he’d be home free. But as was usually the case in his shitty life, it wouldn’t be that easy. There was no lock; the collar was totally smooth, like it had been welded on, and for all he knew it had been. 

Just as gingerly as he’d gotten down, he stood back up and sat down on the edge of the bed. But before he had much longer to process his situation, someone slammed the door open, which made him jump, which made his head start pounding again. 

Someone turned out to be an older man and one of the women who’d first confronted him about Marcus’s demise. Seeing them made the memory come rushing back; he’d gotten back from saying goodbye to Luna and Emma and had been locking Merlotte’s up for the night, and then a blunt object had collided with his head. He probably should have seen that coming. Not his brightest moment. The two wore matching shit-eating grins and both smelled faintly of vampire blood; they were probably high as balls, and if they were that did not bode well. He was about as likely to overpower a were on V as a were on V was to have a rational thought. 

“So how are we doing?” the older man asked, pulling the battered chair up to Sam’s bedside and plopping into it like they were old buddies having a drink together. “You liking the accommodations?” 

“I’ve stayed at worse places,” Sam said. “I’ve gotta give you credit for customer service, though. I’ve never stayed at a hotel that gave out free jewelry before.”

“Oh, you like that? Pure silver, custom made. Doesn’t burn you like it does vampers, but it’ll keep you from shifting.”

Why was it that everyone knew more about being a shifter than he did? If he ever got out of this, he’d have to sit down and grill Emory and Suzanne for information, just so he’d stop looking like an idiot in front of every burnt out werewolf and their mother. 

The woman seemed to lose patience with the conversation and blurted out, “Just ask him where Marcus is, J.D.”

“God fucking damn it, Danielle,” J.D. snarled, his eyes flaring yellow. “Get the hell out of here, go on. He ain’t going anywhere.” As she left, he added, “I guess you know why you’re here now.” 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sam said, as blandly as he could, and an instant later found himself on the concrete floor, blinking away stars. 

J.D. was crouching next to him, eyes boring into him. “Now, if you weren’t the one who killed him, who did? Because he disappeared the night you and Alcide came looking for him. And don’t say he just skipped town, because when our packmaster dies, we know. Just like we know you did it.” He smiled wryly and reached out to ruffle Sam’s hair. “I get it, you know. He fucked your freak brother up pretty bad. But it’s over. You got your revenge. All we want to know is where you dumped him.” 

“My brother’s dead. I’m not telling you shit,” he said, only for the world to disappear in a flurry of lights for a few seconds when he was lifted off the ground and slammed into the wall. “Ain’t nothing you say’s gonna change my mind.” 

“Not even if I told you we’d go after that girlfriend of yours?”

“Empty threat. You dumbass rednecks would never catch her.” And he was surprised to realize, even as he said it, that it wasn’t a bluff; it wouldn’t be unlike Luna to try a grand heroic gesture, but he’d seen the look in her eyes the day of her departure. She’d made up her mind to protect Emma at all costs, and with Marcus out of the picture permanently, she finally had the ability to completely disappear. She was smart enough and strong enough to make a new life in another town in another state, or even another country. Whatever it took to protect herself and Emma—though not necessarily in that order.

J.D. seemed to know, too, that he had a snowball’s chance in Hell of ever actually finding her, let alone catching her even if he managed to figure out where she was—and the pack lacked the collective brainpower to find their own assholes, even before J.D. got them all on V and halved their IQs in the process.

“Laugh it up,” J.D. said finally, his arm like an iron (or maybe, more fittingly, silver) bar across Sam’s neck. “You’ll talk one way or another, and even if you don’t, well.” He let go and stepped back, and Sam crumpled to the ground, trying (and, he suspected, failing) to appear as though he wasn’t struggling for breath. “We can keep you here a long, long time.” 

He left, then, and Sam was alone with his headache and ringing ears and a growing feeling of dread.

~*~*~*~

He’d thought he was done running when he bought the bar. Had told himself that that was it, that it was time to be a man and make a life in Bon Temps, for better or for worse. And for the most part he did. He lived there for years, nurtured the bar, bought properties, and never considered leaving until Maryann came back for him. But since then, it seemed that every time shit got serious, his first instinct was to hide or run or both. He thought he’d quashed that tendency when he let himself get his heart carved out to stop her, but trapped as he was, it came rushing back like it was never gone.

Granted, any sane person would want to run away from his current situation, but he ought to have been putting that desire to use by figuring out an exit strategy. All he did was stare at the door and fiddle with the cuff around his neck, knowing he’d find no way to remove it but unable to stop himself. 

The animals that sometimes wandered near the barn just reminded him how fucked he was. The deer that grazed around the barn at night would have the strength to break out of his cell, and possibly the speed to get away before the weres realized what he’d done. The ubiquitous rodents and insects could fit through structural flaws he himself couldn’t take advantage of, and maybe evade detection long enough to get completely to safety. It felt wrong to be unable to just shift and run, like not shifting during a full moon, except instead of an itch under his skin that was gone by the time he woke up the next morning, it was an incessant, bone-deep ache that stayed with him from the time he woke up to the time he fell back into an uneasy sleep. 

Maybe it was just the overbearing smell of wolves, or the monotony of life in a cell with irregular visitors. He wasn’t even certain how long he’d been there. Should have started scratching tallies into the wall that first night—but then, he also should have skipped town when Luna did, or at least tried to lay low. He’d thought that he’d be safer if he didn’t isolate himself, but he underestimated just how fast weres could be when they wanted to be. And overestimated how dumb they were, clearly.

The monotony broke—or maybe just began to be replaced by a new monotony—when, one day, Danielle made her second appearance, carrying with her what looked like a phlebotomist’s kit. Thing looked like they’d stolen it from a hospital that was abandoned in 1975. 

“You ain’t scared of needles, are you?” she asked, with an empty little smile that she probably thought made her look compassionate. Her concern was somewhat undermined by the fact that she started setting up her equipment before he’d had a chance to respond, and by the fact that she smelled extremely faintly of vampire blood. He figured she was about ready for her fix, which meant her good mood would likely prove to be about as delicate as Maxine Fortenberry’s ego, and twice as volatile when shattered. 

“Not that I’m aware of,” he said, wisely not adding that only a braindead V addict wouldn’t be at least somewhat alarmed at the prospect of being stuck with needles by a strung out werewolf.

“Good. ‘Cause we’re not holding you here to torture you, you know.” 

“No?”

“No. It’s out of respect for Marcus. We just want to know where you buried him. But until then, J.D. says you can still help the pack. Let me see your arm.” She scowled when he pulled away reflexively, and reached out to grab his arm with a startlingly strong grip. 

“You know I’m not a universal donor,” he said as she neatly tied a tourniquet about his upper arm and applied rubbing alcohol to a square of gauze.

“Not why we’re interested. J.D. says we can use shifter blood to dilute V, so our stores go further. Says it doesn’t ruin the effect either; customers won’t be able to tell the difference.”

“Kidnapping and counterfeiting, huh? Gotta give you points for ambition.” After a few tedious moments of her prodding ineffectively at his elbow, he added, “you having trouble finding that vein?”

Her apparent good cheer vanished. “Fuck you. I’m a certified phlebotomist, you know that?” 

She jammed the needle in with what he was certain her phlebotomy instructors would have called excessive force, but every inch of him was already miserable, so it didn’t make a real difference. He watched the blood bag start to fill with part morbid fascination and part nausea, feeling like somehow he’d just watching someone drive the final nail in his coffin, crossed some point past which no one could help him ever again. He knew before that they weren’t planning on letting him go—or letting him get away, if he ever managed to free himself—but he’d always sort of figured that, if he never talked, they’d eventually get bored and kill him, and move on to the next drama. If their little marketing plan worked, he could end up stuck for the long haul. 

“You all really think you can move that much blood?” He kept his voice carefully neutral, but she was still pissed.

“You think we’re pretty fucking dumb, don’t you?” she asked. “Your shifter mommy and shifter daddy tell you all sorts of stories about how weres live in packs because we’re just too fucking dumb to live alone? Figure you can get yourself out of here by manipulating us?” 

“I figure you were supposed to get your V fix about twenty minutes ago, but your alpha sent you down here without it as punishment. What’d you do, steal her boyfriend? Smoke her last ounce?” 

Her eyes had gone bright yellow while he was talking, but she collected herself with some visible effort before responding. “Okay, just because you’re a fucking shifter doesn’t mean you know shit. Rikki can be a bitch, but at her worst she would break you in half at your best. And I’m not going to let you go just because you try to have a conversation with me.” 

She didn’t sound mean about it, which was the worst part. Her conviction was more solid than Alcide’s pecs. After seeing the way they went after him over Marcus—who by all accounts seemed to have been a real douche, even by Alcide’s sleazy girlfriend’s standards—he should have resigned himself to the fact that there was no way to build rapport with someone who was linked up to… their creepy werewolf hivemind thing or whatever it was. But then, he supposed she’d been drinking the koolaid in more ways than one.

By the time she was done, he was beginning to regret taking for granted all the free cookies and orange juice he’d gotten from blood drives over the years.

~*~*~*~

The next time he heard the barn door open and recognized Danielle’s light but somehow still noisy tread, he waited beside the door and greeted her by slamming the chair into her head. She fell and he shoved past her out the door. 

There was no one else in the barn, which he’d known, but the relief was still dizzying. He made all the way to the barn door and yanked fruitlessly at the handle before realizing it was locked with a keycard. How had he never noticed there was a lock? Even as a human, his hearing was good enough that he noticed it every time someone came in, so why hadn’t he noticed that? Surely there’d been a sound when someone had to use their key. A beep, or something different about the sound of the latch opening, or… 

Maybe the hope had still been holding him together too much, even once he’d thought he’d resigned himself to his fate. Hadn’t let him notice the obvious because otherwise he’d fall to pieces and do something stupid like tell them where Marcus was, and make it all have been for nothing.

He was such a fucking dumbass.

It took him too long to remember that Danielle must have had a key on her in order to get in; he had time to get halfway back to the cell before he realized that she’d shifted. Didn’t have time to run before she knocked him down so abruptly that he didn’t have the wherewithall to break his fall and prevent his head from bouncing off the ground, grabbed him by the shoulder with her teeth, and tossed him unceremoniously back into the cell. 

All of it happened so fast that his shoulder didn’t even start hurting until she’d slammed the door shut and shifted back to human, talking furiously to herself all the while. 

“I am so fucking screwed. They’re going to find out. There’s no way I can just—they’re going to kill me.” She rounded on him. “Why did you have to _do_ that?”

“Why did I try to escape from being held captive and tortured?” he asked as dryly as he could manage. 

“We could have made this so much harder on you,” she snarled. After a moment she grabbed her jacket off of the ground and tossed it to him. “Just—put pressure on that. It’ll clot soon.”

As he did so, she pulled her clothes back on and started pulling out her equipment, still talking to herself. The bite wasn’t nearly as serious as it could have been—if she’d wanted, she could have easily taken his arm off; it was lucky for him that they still withheld her daily dose of V until after she’d collected his blood, because she may not have had the control not to otherwise—but it still stung like a motherfucker. So much so that he didn’t even notice until he leaned back against the wall that she’d managed to scratch his back up pretty bad with her claws. He didn’t doubt that she probably was screwed. Her superiors didn’t care what happened to him, so long as what happened to him wasn’t being set free. But even though the others rarely checked on him anymore, as they were probably too busy having orgies and eating raw deer and shitting in the woods, they’d realize something was up if the blood supply ran low, which it would if, in the process of re-capturing him, she hurt him too bad. Then they’d see the bite mark and realize how badly she’d fucked up. Even weres had limits on how stupid you could be before you got kicked out, he guessed.

And then, of course, they might decide he was becoming more trouble than he was worth. Which was not the path he wanted his thoughts to start taking, but …

She peeled her jacket off his shoulder and seemed a little calmer when she realized that the bleeding had slowed down significantly. “Okay,” she said. “I can fix this. I’ll just take a little less this time and if they say shit about it, I’ll just say that you haven’t been eating, or… Oh, fuck, I’m going to have to burn this jacket.”

“They’ll never believe it,” Sam said. Then, when her head snapped around, her expression half-panicked and half-murderous, he added, “I mean, who could resist cup noodles and leftover takeout?” 

She scowled, but most of the anger drained out of her expression. “When we first brought you in, I suggested Purina. But we decided that was a little on the nose.”


	2. Chapter 2

No one came barging in to bear witness to Danielle’s failure, so he figured she was off the hook. 

The scratches and bite mark scabbed over, his remaining blood cells rallied the troops, and the monotony continued as it ever did. Honestly, he was beginning to think that they’d forgotten why they’d captured him in the first place. It wouldn’t be surprising, the amount of V they had to be on at this point. What would be surprising was if they ended up selling even half of their stock, even once they thinned it out with his blood. 

It was just all so fucking… contrived. The first shifter he met turned out to be working for the first person to know he was a shifter, which prompted him to look for his birth family, which backfired horribly but predictably, which prompted him to meet up once a week with three other shifters, which led to him falling in love with one of the three aforementioned shifters, which led to his brother getting killed, which led to Marcus getting killed, which led to… whatever the hell kind of situation he was in.

Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe the isolation was turning him as crazy as Maryann, seeing rituals and premonitions and divine intervention in everything. She’d talked a big game about chaos, but in a lot of ways there was more order to what she did than to what most regular people did. Everything she set into motion was for a specific purpose, and every place, time, and person was a sending. Everything was part of some ritual; even if it wasn’t part of _the_ ritual it was designed to eventually serve that need. Everything for one god, for centuries—and here Sam couldn’t hold down a girlfriend for longer than a few weeks before everything fell apart in the most terrible way possible. There was something sad about that, someone who preached fun and chaos but spent most of her time methodically toiling for a being that had—if it ever really existed—long since forgotten her.

What was doubly sad, he thought, was that he had more in common with Maryann than he was quite comfortable with. Both dogged and ultimately destructive in their drive to obtain an impossibility, though his desires were somewhat more mundane than her divine aspirations and her efforts were somewhat more methodical, when neither really intended it. Both ending up with their hearts ripped out when they finally though they got what they’d wanted. Except for Maryann that had happened just the once, and for him it seemed to keep happening over and over and over and over. 

And neither, of course, were quite so sad as poor Daphne in the freezer with her heart literally ripped out. Sometimes he still wondered what sick shit Maryann had done with it.

It was a pointless, self-pitying train of thought, and he knew he was just getting maudlin from the anemia, but it was surprisingly difficult to derail once he got started. 

Whether it was fate or karma or bad luck, he figured he didn’t have much longer anyways. He healed a bit faster than a human, but while they were careful at first not to take more than he could mostly replenish by the next time they needed a pint or two, they were getting sloppy. Either their product had gotten way more popular way faster than they’d predicted, or they’d started dipping into their own supply too much, or both. It didn’t matter either way. He’d been a hair away from death enough times to know when he was skirting too close to the line. He figured he had maybe a month left if they kept up their current pace.

That knowledge should have scared the shit out of him, but instead he mostly felt a dull resignation. Maybe that was what anemia did to you, or maybe he’d just finally reached the breaking point. 

Either way, they weren’t going to find Marcus on their own—at least, not until the elements had removed any evidence of who’d been around when he kicked the bucket, even to a were’s senses—so Alcide was safe. They weren’t going to find Luna and Emma, and wouldn’t have reason to look once he died, so they were safe. Back in Bon Temps, they’d eventually give up looking for him (if, a spiteful part of him added, they’d ever started looking to begin with) and declare him dead, and his will would take over the rest. Really, it was probably the best outcome he could hope for. 

Except then, as had been the case with every other unfortunate event in his life, something happened to fuck everything up, long after he thought things were as fucked up as they were going to get. The barn door creaked open, but instead of hearing Danielle’s now-familiar footfalls, he heard two people enter. Both were clearly larger than Danielle, but they also moved more quietly. It wasn’t until J.D.’s voice began drifting down the hall that he recognized who it was.

“… and we re-did the whole interior here so that it could house guests,” J.D. was saying. “Looks the same from the outside, but we’ve got it done up real nice inside.”

“I can see that,” the other person said, but though the voice sounded somewhat familiar, Sam couldn’t quite place it. 

Regardless, it must have been a new initiate to the pack, because it was unlikely J.D. would bring anyone here he thought he couldn’t control. The two came closer, but it wasn’t until they were just out of view of his cell that they were close enough to smell and he realized that the person accompanying J.D. was Alcide. 

He ran through the possibilities as quickly as his possibly still-concussed brain would let him, which wasn’t as quick as he would have liked, considering there couldn’t be more than two of them. The first was that Alcide had had a change of heart and decided that the Shreveport pack wasn’t that bad after all—unlikely, considering what the pack had done to Tommy and had tried to do to Emma, and what Debbie had done to Alcide after joining up, but after a certain point you had to accept that anything was possible. The second possibility was that Alcide had figured out that they were keeping Sam here and had come to attempt a rescue.

The first almost would have been preferable. At least in that scenario, it was unlikely that Alcide would attempt some grand heroic gesture and end up getting the both of them killed in some way even worse than the fate that currently awaited him; that being the fairly peaceful if somewhat pathetic and Stockholm-y prospect of wasting away from anemia. Even if it would be kind of depressing that Alcide had turned out to be a douchebag after all, because he’d kind of liked knowing that werewolves weren’t just inherently assholes, and if Alcide wasn’t actually a decent guy, then that would whittle the number of decent weres Sam had met down to approximately fucking zero. 

The door to his cell opened, and Alcide’s face gave no indication as to which of the two possibilities it had been, which wasn’t all that surprising considering that he didn’t seem to be the most emotive guy at the best of times. And either way, it was doubtful he’d be particularly emotive _anyways_ , because in the first scenario he’d be severely lacking in empathy and in the second he’d be undercover and hiding his emotions. Sam couldn’t smell any vampire blood on him, but that wasn’t surprising or indicative of anything, given how strongly J.D. reeked of the stuff all the time. After awhile your nose kind of short-circuited, like when you’re working at a coffee shop or candle store. He’d done a couple of retail stints after Maryann and before the heists, and every day he’d go back home to his shitty apartment feeling like all his nose hairs had gotten burnt off, and half-jokingly worried that he’d never be able to smell anything else ever again. Although burnt coffee and corn syrup based artificial flavorings were significantly more pleasant scents than J.D.’s distinctive brand of vampire blood, werewolf pheromones, and stale ballsweat—though not, he supposed, _objectively_ so. Presumably the rest of the pack would have gotten it into their minds to revolt long ago if they were opposed to blood and corn chips. 

“I’m gonna be honest with you; we still haven’t gotten shit out of him about that little incident,” J.D. was telling Alcide. Like Sam wasn’t even there. “But it ended up revitalizing our financial situation, so who am I to complain, right?” 

“Fuck you,” Sam said, more out of habit than of genuine indignation. He immediately wished he hadn’t, though, because with Alcide in the room, he was suddenly, horribly aware that he didn’t even sound like himself anymore. His voice instead sounded thin and hoarse, like he had a bad cold and hadn’t had anything to drink in days—which to be fair, he actually hadn’t, because Danielle had forgotten to bring him water when she was taking his blood yesterday—and it was just… it would have been better not to know, is all. Which seemed to have become the story of his life ever since vampires came out of the coffin. 

Alcide looked vaguely sick. 

Jesus fuck. 

It was really going to happen, then. All this so he wouldn’t bring anyone else down with him, and Alcide was planning on ruining it for everyone else. 

He shouldn’t have expected anything less, really. Everything he touched turned to shit, so it made sense that he couldn’t even martyr himself without making a mess of it. 

~*~*~*~

Alcide showed up a few nights later, on his own.

“They gave you a key card already?” Sam asked, trying to head off the inevitable questions about how long he’d been there, what had happened, if he was okay, etc. 

“Not their brightest move. What the hell did they do to you? J.D.’s saying they stopped you from shifting.”

“Yeah, this thing is silver. Never knew it could do that, but I’m still stuck here, aren’t I?”

“Can I—?” He gestured vaguely at the collar. 

Sam shrugged. “Go ahead.”

Alcide leaned in—all tentative, like he thought Sam would fall apart if he moved too fast—and gingerly examined it, testing how much give it had. Which wasn’t a fucking lot. Eventually he cursed and gave up, frown deeper than ever. “I thought I could sneak in some bolt cutters, get that thing off you, and then you could just fly out. But it’s too tight for that. And it’s too thick for a ring cutter. How did they even get it on?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. They put it on while I was knocked out.” He didn’t quite dare to ask what the new plan was, because part of him was convinced this was all part of some uncharacteristically sophisticated ploy on the part of the pack, and the other part was convinced that Alcide would give up and go home once he’d exhausted the obvious escape options and assuaged his apparent guilt. 

“Did that happen when they caught you?” Alcide asked, motioning at the bite wound on Sam’s shoulder.

Sam shook his head. “Tried to escape.” 

Alcide just looked like he was trying really hard not to look vaguely ill, which was a sweet gesture, but ultimately just made him feel that much worse. Being pitied made him feel like shit, and it felt even lousier to be apparently so pitiable that people felt they couldn’t display that pity in his presence without upsetting him further. 

“I’m going to get you out. It’s just going to take some planning. Just—be ready, I guess.” He looked like he wanted to say something more, but settled for a few seconds of awkward eye contact before getting up and leaving.

The door closed and Sam felt a thrill of something that was somewhere between hope and panic. 

~*~*~*~

He spent the next few days pacing in his cell, filled with energy that he hadn’t had for a long time. But it was an anxious sort of energy that left him feeling more sick than it did energized; he didn’t pace out of hope for the future or a renewed desire to run, but rather because it was the only thing that made the insistent itch under his skin go away.

When Alcide showed up again, he looked a little frazzled, himself. 

“They’re on a hunt,” Alcide said. “Probably won’t be back until morning. Once I get you out of here you can just walk out.”

“Just like that?” 

Alcide shrugged, half-apologetic and half-awkward. “The door is pretty much the last line of defense. They seemed pretty confident you weren’t going to get out of this cell.” 

That wasn’t exactly a comfort. If it was that easy, he should have figured out a way to get out of it on his own, without dragging someone else into it. It made him feel all the more pathetic for resigning himself to eventual death by exsanguination at the hands of some strung out college dropout whose main aspirations in life involved orgies in the woods. 

It didn’t feel real. From the outside, his cell looked small and almost innocuous. It bore little evidence that he had lived there for the past weeks, and littler evidence that it had seen misery. There was a slight dip in the mattress where he had slept, and a chip in the leg of the chair where it had cracked against Danielle’s head, and a few faint stains on the floor and wall where he’d bled after his escape attempt. He could smell the acrid scents of illness and fear and misery, but those would fade quickly. 

The refurbished barn seemed similarly normal. It felt as if it should look like the set of a horror movie, but it didn’t. It _had_ seemed like a horror movie, back during that first escape attempt, but now it was just a barn that still smelled faintly of new construction. The ground didn’t even show much wear from Danielle’s repeated trips to his cell. 

What he had been through felt as though it should have left a mark. But it seemed like in this, as in most other things in his life, what he did or what was done to him didn’t really matter. If he’d died here, they would have dumped his body in the swamp for the gators to eat, and the world would have kept on spinning. His friends in Bon Temps would fuss for awhile, but they’d get used to his absence fast enough. They’d probaby replace Merlotte’s with a chain restaurant. 

The door beeped anticlimactically when it swung open.

The first thing that hit him was the smell—or rather, the lack thereof. No stink of wolves, no stink of his own blood, no lingering, sour stink of illness and fear. Just the clarity of cool air, the sharp smells of grass and trees and deer and rabbits and mice, the acrid but living and familiar smell of his own blood dried on his clothes. He just wanted to shift and _go_ , just follow whichever scent trail seemed most promising and dig a hole for no reason and bark at grazing rabbits and then maybe shift to owl even though he sucked at flying and fly until his wings ached too much to keep going.

Secondary to that was the fact that his entire body felt too-light and thus slightly more difficult to control, the way his arm had felt after the removal of a cast he’d had in middle school. He kept stumbling and nearly falling, until finally Alcide just grabbed onto his good arm and half-dragged him towards the truck. 

As they pulled onto the dirt road, Sam half-expected them to be instantly followed by the baying of wolves, but they weren’t. He expected the howling to start up once they got onto the main road, but it didn’t. 

“Could they be following without us knowing it?” Sam asked, and almost wished he hadn’t, because his voice sounded even more grotesque outside of captivity, against the jarringly normal sounds of the truck’s engine and AC—pinched and almost tinny. 

“If they knew you were gone, we’d know all about it by now,” Alcide said grimly. 

“Guess they won’t know till morning, then,” Sam said. “Think that’ll be enough of a head start?” 

“It’ll have to be.” Then, seeming to realize that that wasn’t the most reassuring thing to say, he asked where Sam wanted to go, though he was already pulling onto the freeway, seeming to have decided that it was better to remain in motion than to wait for Sam’s response. 

What he really wanted was to go home, to shift and run through the woods and smell the familiar trees, and then to hole up in his trailer until one of Bon Temps’ numerous busybodies worked up the nerve to bang down his door and nag him into going back to work just to stop the gossip. But the metal still biting into his neck told him that that was an impossibility.

“I’m guessing they’ll be looking for me in Bon Temps,” he said finally.

“They’ll know I helped you, so my place isn’t safe either.” 

Fuck. He wasn’t so wrapped up in his own misery that guilt couldn’t make him feel that much worse. “I’m sorry,” he said. 

“You got no reason to be,” Alcide said. “All my stuff’s in the back; I went into this with my eyes open.” Then, before Sam could respond, he added, “we can stay with my dad for a bit. We aren’t on good terms, so they probably won’t think to look there right away, and it’s close to another pack’s territory, so when they do come looking there’ll be some red tape for them to cut through.”

Alcide glanced over at him as if to look for indications of dissent, but Sam didn’t have a a better plan—or any plan at all, for that matter—so he just shrugged. “Fine by me.”

“We just need to make a couple stops first.”


	3. Chapter 3

A couple of stops ended up being a gas station an hour’s drive north where Alcide bought provisions and left a few scraps of Sam’s thoroughly bloody and grimy shirt in the parking lot. Sam quickly downed half of the bottle of water, but couldn’t bring himself to do more than pick at the food. Then it was a fast food restaurant a half hour’s drive west of that where he dumped the half-eaten food and a few more scraps of shirt, then finally a truck stop where they both scrubbed off the worst of the Shreveport pack’s scent, Sam dressed in some of Alcide’s spare clothing, they hosed off the truck to disrupt the scent trail, and they dumped the rest of his ruined clothing. 

Alcide’s clothes were too big for him, but he felt marginally saner in clean clothes that smelled of dryer sheets instead of his own blood and fear. There was no escaping the smell of werewolves, but Alcide’s scent wasn’t quite so objectionable as the scent of a pack’s…. den, he guessed. He’d heard that vampires sometimes lived in what they called nests, where a whole bunch of them just sat around having orgies and sharing food and drinking each other’s blood and shit, and that when they did that it made them crazier and meaner than they already were; maybe something similar happened to packs that fed on vampire blood together. A similar thing certainly happened to large groups of drunks. 

He didn’t like that train of thought—and when he tried to distract himself by straightening his hair in the mirror, he liked what he saw even less. It was one thing to have a shitty experience, and another to see what it had really done to him. He was in desperate need of a shave, but that didn’t hide the dark circles under his eyes, or the sallow tinge to his skin, or the fact that he’d lost a noticeable amount of weight. Not that the number was probably all that big, but it was the kind of loss you noticed in a bad way. Not ‘Andy’s on the Atkins Diet again, good for him’ five pounds, but Lettie Mae on a bender five pounds. He didn’t look like himself; he looked drawn and haggard, and there was a flat quality to his eyes that made him think of the way Melinda had watched Tommy in the ring.

It was too uncomfortable to look for long. After a few moments—moments that were mostly spent zoning out rather than grooming—he gave up and went outside to the truck. 

It was probably a couple of hours past midnight, and the weather—humid and slightly warm—was typical for pretty much every time of year in Louisiana, so it didn’t mean much. Could have been anywhere from March to November. Standing there outside a truck stop restroom and staring at a sign that read NO SOLICITING, his wet hair dripping steadily onto the back of his borrowed shirt, he felt for a moment like he could be anyone. Like he could just let go over everything that had happened recently, and start walking, and start a new life. It was a stupid, defensive train of thought; the thought process, he was sure, of a dog whose owners dumped it across the freeway so it couldn’t find its way back home. Except like a dumped dog, he’d probably still always know somewhere deep down what he’d left behind—or what had left him behind. And unlike a dog, he was probably too smart to be distracted (even momentarily) from that hollowness by french fries pilfered from fast food restaurant dumpsters.

Probably. 

Then Alcide emerged from the back of the truck and slammed the doors shut, and the spell was broken. 

“Ready to go?” he called, then when he’d made his away back around to the front of the truck he paused and frowned. “You okay?” 

“Yeah,” Sam said, starting over towards the truck. His voice sounded better. Or maybe he was just used to it already. “Just tired. Processing.” He buckled his seatbelt more passive aggressively than he’d meant to. 

“Okay,” Alcide said. “It’s a bit of a drive. Should be past dawn when we get there.” 

The last of the adrenaline was wearing off, and instead of disbelief and mild panic, he mostly felt numb and exhausted. The atmosphere was growing tenser as they drove down the sparsely populated highway, and he kept thinking about opening the passenger door, shifting to owl, and just getting away. Not from Alcide specifically, but from everything even vaguely related to this shithole. Pull a Tara, but ramp it up and move to the middle of nowhere in Canada. He’d remade himself before, and if he flew he wouldn’t leave a scent or paper trail. Except then he’d remember that he couldn’t shift, and he’d feel like his joints had been replaced with lead weights. 

What he wanted to do now—besides go home or to Canada to open a diner and sell those foul Canadian cheese curd fries—was to sleep, and he was just tired enough that he might have been able to despite the general shittiness of the situation, but Alcide kept casting what he probably thought were subtle concerned glances at him, so finally he spoke up. “If you’re feeling guilty or like you need to be doing something, you can talk at me about something while I try to catch my first nap as a free man.”

“About what?”

“Whatever you feel like.”

“All right.” He seemed to hesitate for a moment, and then fell into a story that felt as if it were well-worn but that he told awkwardly. It was as if he had gone over it too much in his head, but never really told it out loud. “So I guess I never told you before that you weren’t the first shifter I’ve met. Not that we ever sat down and talked. I knew this guy once, before Dad got abjured, which would be over a decade ago now. His parents had been killed by vampires, but they were around long enough to teach him about what he was. He’d been putting himself through a community college where I grew up, but he was planning on transferring to LSU once he had a steady job. You know already that weres and shifters don’t usually get along, but my dad didn’t raise me to be a bigot and he never had a bad thing to say about us. I think maybe he was lonely. Anyways, we’d spend a lot of time talking…”

~*~*~*~

When he woke up, it was with that deep, instinctive knowledge that something was wrong, that knowledge that tells you when you’re being watched or that the ground beneath you is about to give way. 

Teetering on the edge of panic, he looked out the passenger window, and saw that they were being pursued, but not by wolves. It was Maryann, running along the interstate, wearing a bull’s skull and a white dress, her hair and skirts fluttering behind her as she easily kept pace with the truck. She bore effortlessly what must have been the significant weight of the skull and somehow that fact was what pushed him off of the edge of panic and directly into the deep end. 

And the truck was slowing. 

He turned to ask Alcide what the fuck he was thinking, but the driver’s seat was instead occupied by Marcus. His throat closed up and he could only watch as Marcus produced a knife while Maryann, who had long since closed the distance to the truck, pressed herself against the passenger window, scraping against it with her clawed hands, the bull’s skull grinning emptily. 

The knife plunged into his chest and he snapped awake, his heart pounding. A quick glance to the left verified that Alcide was still driving and that Maryann and Marcus hadn’t actually come back from the dead to sacrifice him, but it still took a few long moments before his pulse slowed back down and he was able to slip back into sleep.

~*~*~*~

When he next woke up, they were still on the Interstate, and a ratty old quilt was draped tentatively over his lap. Sookie could make fun of him for it all she wanted, but he’d always liked car rides, particularly when he wasn’t the one driving, and particularly when the driver didn’t feel the need to cover up the white noise with small talk. The road was nearly empty and the radio was silent—Alcide was probably afraid it would wake him—but the quiet roar of the roadway noise was somehow comforting, and for a minute he almost felt normal. At least, until he moved slightly in his seat and felt the AC-chilled metal of the collar bite into his neck. 

“Fuck,” he said under his breath. He let his head fall back against the seat, but that just set it to pounding again, which made him curse again. 

“You okay?” Alcide asked without taking his eyes off the road. 

He scrubbed his hands across his face. “Thought for a minute maybe I’d dreamed it all.”

“I’ve never been that lucky, either.”

“Can you turn on the radio?”

Alcide obliged, but the only station that was coming in clear was an AM talk station where the host was on a tirade about how vampires were destroying society, and that there was a conspiracy to cover up the existence of other supernatural creatures, and how concerned listeners could protect themselves by buying oddly specific brands of colloidal silver and hand-carved stakes made from ethically sourced papally blessed wood. 

Sam turned the radio off just as the host began to discuss the proper ways to ward off Jersey Devil attacks. “Can we make a stop?” he asked. 

“That’d probably be all right,” Alcide said. “What for?”

“I just need to call someone. That’s all.” 

“There’s a rest stop a few miles ahead. We can pull off there and you can pick up a burner.” He glanced at the silver on Sam’s neck and added, “Maybe it’d be best if I went in for you.” 

It was starting to feel like he’d traded sitting around in a cell all day to sitting around in a truck all day, but it was true that the collar would draw attention that they desperately didn’t need. So he sat around and waited, and when Alcide came back with the disposable cell, he dialed the Bellefleurs. 

Arlene was the one who picked up. “I don’t recognize this number but I’m warning you now, I am not a morning person and if you’re calling to sell me something or say something nasty I can’t guarantee I’m going to be nice.” 

“Arlene, it’s Sam.”

“What? Oh my god. We all thought you were dead! Well, some people said you’d skipped town, but I really thought you were—oh, well, I guess it doesn’t matter now. So what happened exactly? You in some kind of trouble? ‘Cause you sound awful.” 

“Listen, I can’t tell you much—“

“I _knew_ you were in deep shit—“

“But I just thought someone ought to know that I’m not dead and, uh, I aim to come back. Soon. So don’t go dividing up my assets just yet, if you don’t mind.” 

“Christ’s sake, Sam, it’s only been three months. Is there—you know, anything we can do to help?” 

They were still in the same timezone, so it’d be early morning there too, before either Arlene or Terry needed to get up for work. He could hear her mattress squeaking as she shifted slightly, so she was probably sitting up in bed, with Terry either still asleep or just starting to wake up and pestering her about who was calling. For a minute he wanted to tell her everything, or hang up and go home and just deal with the fallout when it happened. Bon Temps had weathered worse. He felt nostalgic for every stupid thing about it, from the few people he actually liked to the speciesist rednecks to the faint scarring where they reattached Jane Bodehouse’s finger. Felt like he’d been gone three years instead of three months. 

Christ, his head hurt.

“No, no. Just look after the bar, okay? There’s cash in the file cabinet in my trailer; the key’s buried under the porch. There should be enough to cover all of ya’ll for—for awhile.”

“Of course. Only, how soon is soon?” 

He hung up and handed the phone to Alcide before he could do anything stupid like tell her more than he already had, or call someone else. Alcide crushed the phone and dropped it into the nearest trashcan. 

“I know it’s hard,” Alcide said as he got back into the driver’s seat. “Just remember you’re going to go back one day.” 

He almost mentioned the fact that Tara stayed away from over a year before coming back, but the thought made his throat tighten. When he was in that cell, he hadn’t thought about what would happen if/when he got free, but it wouldn’t have occurred to him that he might have to stay away for that long or longer. What if this shit dragged on for years? He could just picture himself hunkered down in a cheap motel, living off of crappy food and sleeping with one eye open. Never relaxing, always listening for howling, always thinking that they’d be behind every knock on his door. Missing out on whatever fucked up shit was going on in Bon Temps—new supernaturals being discovered because they couldn’t resist the magnetic draw of Sookie’s cleavage, people getting married, drama spilling over into the bar. How long could he stay away before he’d be assumed dead? How many cryptic calls from remote phone booths could he make before everyone just sort of gave up answering?

Maybe the thought process was predictable, or maybe Alcide was more perceptive than he’d given him credit for. Or he was just that much more obvious than he’d given himself credit for. Either way, he was snapped out of his thought process by Alcide putting a hand on his good shoulder—gently enough that it didn’t jar any of his injuries, but firmly enough that it brought him back to reality. 

“Hey, hey. Look at me, all right? I promise you you’re going to go back,” Alcide said. 

“Wish I could believe that,” Sam said bitterly. “More likely than not they’ll kill me, then you for betraying them. Then your dad, if he’s as suicidal as you and actually lets us stay with him. And it’s not going to be as quick as what happened to Marcus. You’ve talked to them enough times to know that.” 

His shoulder felt cold and oddly bereft when Alcide removed his hand. 

“You don’t mean that,” Alcide said. “You’re just…” 

He scrubbed his hands over his face. “I know. I’m grateful for what you did, all right? I just—“ It would probably sound ungrateful at best and downright hostile at worst if he mentioned that he wished that Alcide hadn’t saved him. Not to mention it was likely fatalistic enough that he’d probably end up treating him even more delicately than he already was, and Alcide already had a pretty gentle touch for a guy who was about a head taller than just about everyone and built like the love interest on the covers of 80s-style romance novels that Maxine Fortenberry vehemently denied ever reading. 

“This isn’t the time to be having this conversation,” Alcide said firmly, and stuck the keys in the ignition. 

He turned on the radio, even though they still only got that deranged talk station. They turned back onto the interstate as the host rambled on about The Vampire Agenda and sunlight began leaching away the darkness. Sam found himself hoping fervently that Alcide’s father was smarter than Alcide himself. 

~*~*~*~

Alcide and his father had apparently had more than their share of differences, but on this particular issue, they found common ground. Sam should have guessed; he knew better than anyone that stupid runs in families. 

Jackson Herveaux lived on the outskirts of a trailer park, in a compound containing two trailers that was surrounded by apparently improvised silver fencing. The woods weren’t too far behind the compound, and he apparently went there not infrequently to hunt, because a large part of the compound was taken up by a butchering station. 

It was a little sad, if Sam was being totally honest. Not in the sense that Jackson was pathetic, but sad because he’d clearly isolated himself after whatever had happened to wreck the relationship between him and Alcide. One of the trailers was clearly lived in—Sam could smell it was someone’s den just from where he was, sitting in the truck—and from what he’d overheard he’d apparently been using the other one as storage. 

“I can clean that one up a bit,” he was saying neutrally. Alcide had parked Sam in the truck while he’d gone to talk to his dad, but Sam could faintly hear their conversation, and he thought that while Jackson didn’t seem particularly proud of his home, he didn’t seem embarrassed by it either. “Your friend can sleep there, and you can bunk with me.”

“That seems like the best course of action, yeah.” 

“Ended up being a chip off the old block after all, huh? I leave the pack with a crap ton of money, and you leave a pack after scraping that sorry bastard into your truck and—“

“You know he can hear you.” 

“Well, I know he’s a shifter. I’m not that old. I was trying to embarrass you, not him.” 

Alcide emerged from the trailer, looking irritated but not really upset. He opened the door of the truck and said, “I guess you heard all that.” 

“Couldn’t help it. Sorry.” 

“No, it’s—it’s fine. Listen, we could be here awhile. I thought I’d go somewhere and pick up some clothes for you that actually fit, maybe stock up on some more food, since Dad’s been shopping for one for so long. Will you be okay staying here if I go out for awhile?”

 _Would_ he be okay? He felt like he was thinking it over for an awkwardly long time before he finally replied. “Yeah, you know, I’ll be fine. I feel fine, all things considered.” 

From how hard Alcide appeared to be trying to keep his expression from slipping out of neutral and into concerned, he didn’t look fine. Truth be told, he was mostly so exhausted that he was feeling more and more like this was just an unusually detailed dream, and that any second he’d wake up back in his cell. Or maybe strung up on Maryann’s tribute. 

Alcide must have decided that he’d have to cut the cord eventually, because finally he nodded. “I’ll introduce you to Dad.”

It took him longer than he’d like to get out of the truck, between his general exhaustion and the injuries he sustained in captivity and the joint stiffness that goes hand-in-hand with long car rides, but he managed it without stumbling. By the time he got the passenger side door shut, Jackson was waiting a few feet away, exchanging a meaningful glance with Alcide. 

“The two of you are way too comfortable with each other for people who are supposed to be estranged,” Sam said. It came out ruder than he’d intended. 

After exchanging awkward pleasantries, they planted him on one of the picnic benches near the butchering station. Alcide left in the truck, and Jackson retreated to the trailers to start making room for them. 

The day promised to be a sweltering one despite the season; the morning sun was already punishingly bright, and watching it glint off of the slightly grimy trailers made his head start pounding again. He closed his eyes against the glare, and unintentionally drifted off into a doze.

~*~*~*~

He woke up when he heard Alcide’s truck approaching. 

Alcide had purchased enough food and water to keep them in business for a few weeks, some basic clothing that wouldn’t be two sizes too big on Sam, and ammo. He wouldn’t have thought that werewolves would have much use for guns, but then again, he himself had a gun, so maybe it wasn’t all that strange. 

While he’d dozed, it had become late afternoon and Jackson had finished tidying up the guest trailer. He was starting to feel like a burden on multiple fronts, but frankly, he was just happy to be out of the truck. It made him feel slightly more proactive even though he knew he was still just sitting around waiting to be killed and/or recaptured to be used as a bloodbag until his eventual death. And besides, the longer he’d sat in the truck the more he’d started to realize that it smelled—extremely faintly—of Tommy. It had been professionally cleaned (not that he expected Alcide or anyone would have sprung for anything less after having someone vomit blood all over the windshield) but underneath the strongest smells of Alcide and old food, there were the faint scents of cleaning chemicals and Tommy’s blood.

He’d really, _really_ fucked that one up.

“So,” he said, once he’d showered again and changed into the clothes Alcide bought for him. “Are you going to get this thing off me?”

Alcide and Jackson exchanged a look. 

“We don’t quite have the right tools,” Jackson said evasively, seeming to have decided that the best way to mend his fraught relationship with his son was to be the bearer of bad news in his stead. His voice was too carefully neutral for it to mean anything else. As far as mundanely self-sacrificing fatherly gestures went, it was a pretty good one. 

“So you can’t,” Sam said. He could hear his voice going flat and resentful and preemptively hated himself for it, but he couldn’t stop it from happening. “It’s—it’s a stupid piece of metal. Can’t you just get some bolt cutters and go to town on it?”

“That was plan A,” Alcide said. “But it’s like I told you before I broke you out; it’s too tight. We wouldn’t be able to get bolt cutters under it, and if we tried to saw it off we’d end up slitting your throat.”

Maybe that’d be better. He didn’t say that out loud, but they must have known the spiral his thoughts were rapidly headed towards, because Jackson rushed to say that he was already combing through his contacts for someone who could remove the collar without killing him, and Alcide was vehement that even if it took awhile to find someone who could get the job done and wouldn’t go running off to Shreveport at the first opportunity, they would definitely figure something out in the near future. 

He pasted on a fake smile and acted like they’d been reassuring instead of just diplomatic, and once they left him alone to get settled in, he let the magnitude of what had happened that day sink in.

After tedious months of captivity, freedom had come on dizzyingly fast. In the span of twenty-four hours, he’d thrown months of limbo down the toilet and exchanged it for what would quite possibly be a few weeks of freedom—if you could call hiding out in a washed up old man’s trailer and feeling sorry for yourself freedom— followed by a slow and painful death. As opposed to the slow but slightly less painful death that had awaited him before. 

He couldn’t sleep, was the main problem with that train of thought. He was so exhausted even after napping that he thought he’d fall right asleep after showering and changing into clean clothes. The trailer was surprisingly clean considering its apparent disuse, the bedding shabby but comfortable and well-maintained, and the clothing he was wearing was a far cry better than what he’d been stuck in for the past few months. And the trailer was certainly bigger than his cell. Yet it felt claustrophobic. Every noise was the pack catching up to them, and whenever he managed to coax his eyes shut they didn’t stay that way for long, because the second he did it seemed that someone was hovering over the bed, waiting for him to drop off so that they could drag him back to the cell, or cut out his heart to summon Dionysus or whatever bullshit that had really been about. 

It was stupid. All he’d wanted all day was to lay down in a real bed (preferably the one in his own home in Bon Temps, but he knew that was unrealistic) and get real sleep, but once his head touched the pillow those desires fled. 

His new clothes felt ill-fitting and constrictive. He kicked off the covers, but that just made matters worse. 

Finally, feeling stupid—but not stupid enough to leave well enough alone—he darted out of the trailer and headed for the one Alcide was sharing with his father. It hadn’t even been a full day, but it already smelled like he’d been living there for weeks, and the clothing and other belongings that had been in the truck had been transferred in and organized neatly. 

He opened up drawers until he found one that was full of Alcide’s clothes, then pulled out a fistful of shirts and dashed back to his trailer. 

He’d ended up pilfering three t-shirts. They were clean and smelled more like dryer sheets than anything else, but they still smelled more like Alcide than anything else in the trailer, and the fabric had the almost-threadbare softness you only get by wearing the shirt a couple dozen times. It seemed almost perverse, that after escaping a pack of werewolves he didn’t feel safe unless he also stank of werewolf, but when he pulled one of the shirts over his head, a not-insignificant portion of tension drained out of him. It was enough that when he curled back up on the bed—not the most comfortable position in his current state, but preferable to the other options—he finally felt able to fall asleep. 

Once sleep started creeping up on him, it took over scarily fast.


	4. Chapter 4

He spent most of his time sleeping, waking up at odd hours to eat, and then sleeping some more. When he stayed awake long enough to think, he just felt like shit. Shitty that captivity had reduced him so easily to someone who felt it was a luxury to sleep in a real bed and to eat reheated junk at 3:00am, shitty that he still couldn’t shift, shitty that he considered it a freedom to sleep an uninterrupted twelve hours without someone kicking him awake to interrogate him or drain him like a deer destined for the stew pot, shitty that he could sleep an uninterrupted twelve hours without feeling guilty about it. 

Then he felt guilty that he didn’t feel guilty about sleeping away what could be his last days on earth. Guilty that he was imposing on Alcide’s father, guilty that Alcide and his father were now marked for death because of him, when Alcide had saved his life twice. Guilty that, even as he slept in Jackson’s bed and ate his food and put his life in danger, he felt resentful that they still hadn’t found someone to take off the silver. At least if he could shift again he wouldn’t have to depend on someone else for protection. He could just live out the rest of his life as a rat or something, and live in the sewers where the wolves couldn’t smell him. Though he doubted either of them would be off the hook even if he vanished tomorrow. They’d probably kill Alcide for helping him escape, and Jackson for harboring both of them. 

The worst part was that a small part of him would have been happy to live in this limbo forever. The longer he went without shifting, the more he worried that, once the silver was off, he still wouldn’t be able to. Maybe it would be better if he never had to find out. 

There’d been at least one or two full moons while he was being held captive; Arlene had said three months, but she could have been rounding up or down or entirely wrong depending on how fucked up things had been on Bon Temps since he’d been gone, and Alcide had been squirrelly about giving him details about how long he’d been in that cage, and he himself had forgotten exactly when they’d captured him—which was a fucking terrifying thought, but one he’d been trying to stamp out—but it had been late summer when he was taken, and the local news channel on the ancient TV in Jackson’s trailer said that it was mid-October. However long it’d really been, he’d definitely never gone this long without shifting before, and that was a fact he preferred to forget, to drown out with junk food and too much sleep.

Alcide and Jackson, for their part, seemed to be nearly as reluctant to think about the future as he did. Jackson because no one holds on to life more tightly than an old bastard who didn’t do right by his kids—or at least, whose kids think he didn’t do right by them. And Alcide because he was wracked with his own guilt over this whole mess, because those pieces of shit in Shreveport would likely have let Sam go if he’d told them that it was Alcide who killed Marcus—though of course he was just being way too noble, because the only reason Sam hadn’t talked is because Alcide had only killed Marcus to save his life. And the only reason Alcide did that is because Marcus only worked up the nerve to take Emma when he started having an affair with Debbie, and the reason that had happened is because Sam started sleeping with Marcus’s ex-girlfriend…

They could go around and around on that forever, but Sam thought that at the end of the day, he’d win. Sam’s one good deed wasn’t worth the amount of shit Alcide had gotten himself into by saving him.

They tiptoed around him, didn’t say anything about his sleeping schedule or habit of clearing out the leftovers every forty-eight hours or the fact that he’d go three days without showering only to, when he finally dragged himself into the shower, use an excessive amount of their soap and then stand under the water until the tank ran completely dry—usually late at night so that it ended up completely fucking the two of them over when they tried to take their morning showers. 

It wasn’t intentional, which was the scary part. He finally understood why his family was the way they were. You dig a hole deep enough and eventually you can’t stop yourself from digging. 

And he did try to stop. He found an alarm clock in one of the cabinets and set it for a decent hour, but no matter what time he set it he’d always wake up mid-afternoon, without any memory of the fact that the alarm had gone off, or that he had apparently torn the cord out of the electrical socket. Once he tried to set it up all the way across the trailer, so he’d have to get out of bed to turn it off, but he woke up sleeping at the table, having apparently gotten up, torn the cord out of the socket, and gone back to sleep where he sat. 

He figured that everything had just finally caught up to him. This was the culmination of not just the events of the past few months, but of all the stress he’d internalized since he came home from school to find his parents were just gone. The guilt of lying to everyone he’d ever met until he told Sookie what he was, and the guilt of the two bodies he’d buried, and the guilt of what he’d done to his real parents. 

Maybe Luna had been right about shifters having more cortisol in their blood than humans, except it didn’t just give them shorter fuses, but also made them completely fucking suck at dealing with their problems, and excel at bottling everything up.

The one thing he didn’t do was drink. 

~*~*~*~

One day he woke up to the sound of yelling, and he sprung out of bed despite his ribs’ firm protests, thinking that maybe they were finally under attack. Except when he left the trailer, he found the compound still and quiet, with the yelling coming just from the trailer Jackson and Alcide had been sharing since Sam and Alcide’s arrival. 

He heard, through the thin walls of the trailer, an extremely pissed off snarl, but couldn’t tell if it had come from Alcide or his father. 

“You still want to know why I stole from the pack?”

“This should be good.”

“You think I did it because I’m a greedy old man. Well, I may be that, but that’s not why I did it. I did it because of how they got their money. It was that shifter you were friends with then, the one you thought left town. He didn’t leave town. A bunch of guys from the pack had taken him—maybe because they didn’t like how close you two were, or just because they didn’t like shifters. I don’t know. What I do know is they’d been forcing him to fight, and placing bets on the outcome. I stepped in to put a stop to things, but it didn’t distract them long enough; he’d shifted a stag and tried to escape, but they closed ranks and cut him down. They only stopped long enough to listen to me after they’d torn that boy to pieces and realized they’d crossed a line. I made them give me every cent they made off him, burned it in front of them, then abjured myself.” 

“You let me think all these years—“

“I didn’t tell you because it wasn’t your responsibility, and I didn’t want you to live your life like me just because of what those assholes did to your friend. Maybe you did have a right to know. If not telling you hurt you, that’s on me too.” 

The door to the trailer slammed open, and Alcide stormed out, shifted, and made a beeline for the woods, all without glancing once at Sam. He had to know Sam had heard everything. Maybe he should have left, but there was nowhere in the compound he could go without hearing them, at the volume they were arguing, and they were the ones who’d told him not to go outside the fencing. 

Jackson emerged a few moments later, a freshly opened beer in one hand, and started gathering up and folding the clothes Alcide had left behind. 

“You got any kids?” Jackson asked. Then, when Sam shook his head: “Ever wanted any?” 

“Thought about it sometimes. Not sure if I’m really cut out for it.” Pretty much anyone he’d ever been responsible for before had ended up in life-threatening peril as a direct consequence of their association with him. It must have taken genuine bad parenting talent to take a life like Tommy’s, which had been a steaming pile of crap from birth, and turn it into a worse pile of crap. He and his parents died barely a year after knowing Sam, as a direct result of Sam’s interference in their lives. Maybe he should have left well enough alone; it was selfish to go looking for his birth parents, thinking he was entitled to a different family just because his adoptive one screwed him over. Thinking he could give Tommy a better life just because Joe Lee was a piece of shit. At least Melinda and Joe Lee had never gotten Tommy killed.

“You’re never really sure,” Jackson said. “Even once they’re grown, even if they turn out to be good people, you never know if it was because of you or despite you.” 

“Sounds like you tried to do right. That’s more than my folks could say.” Both sets, he wanted to add bitterly, but didn’t. 

“You only heard my side. We always tell ourselves we tried. You ask Alcide about it, he’ll probably have something entirely different to tell you.” He set the clothes near the entrance to the compound, then started fiddling with the grill. “You hungry? I can fix you something. Might do you good to eat something fresh, instead of leftovers.”

He didn’t say it mean, but Sam still felt his face heat up. “That’d be great, thanks,” he said, though he wasn’t especially hungry, especially after hearing that story about the guy getting torn apart by werewolves. 

“I’m close to finding someone who’ll get that thing off your neck,” he said as he puttered around with the grill. “Sorry it’s taken so long, but I had to be sure I found someone we could trust not to go running off to Shreveport the second they figured out what was going on. This isn’t exactly the last place they’d look.” 

“I don’t want to seem ungrateful,” Sam said. “You’ve already done a lot for me.” 

“You don’t want to, but you can’t help it, right? I don’t have much room to judge.” 

That made him feel worse than if he was judging, but he figured he was being enough of a pain without complaining about the precise wording of whatever he said to make him feel better. The conversation turned lighter once the food hit the table, and despite still feeling like an ungrateful shit, it left Sam feeling more human than he had in a long time. 

Jackson went to bed sometime past midnight, but Sam stayed up despite his growing drowsiness. 

Alcide returned a little before dawn, still in wolf form, with blood on his face. He must have gone for a hunt to burn off some of the excess emotion. He shifted back to human once he’d entered the compound, and didn’t even glance at Sam until after he’d rinsed his face off with the hose.

“Your dad left your clothes out for you,” Sam said. 

“Thoughtful,” Alcide said, with only a trace of sarcasm. “Didn’t expect you’d still be up.” He said that part much gentler, which felt worse than it would have if it’d been sarcastic. Was Sam really that pathetic that, weeks after the fact, Alcide would still put his own hurt aside and wrap everything he said in bubble wrap?

“Oh, I had to come out of hibernation eventually.” He almost added that now he’d have to start fixing his fucked up sleep schedule, then realized that there was a strong possibility none of them would be alive long enough to see that particular effort bear fruit. “He cooked, by the way. There’s still some left.” 

Alcide’s face darkened a little. “I ate,” he said, but he sat down at the table anyways, seeming to think it’d be too awkward to walk away after confessing to eating Bambi during a werewolf tantrum. 

“Hey, I’m not judging. We all go out into the woods on occasion to roll around in our own shit and eat deer guts. It’s fine. It’s, you know, natural.” 

“I didn’t roll around in my own shit,” Alcide said, but he looked marginally less uncomfortable. “And it was a squirrel, not a deer.”

“That’s worse, actually. Listen, I know it wasn’t my conversation to hear—“ 

“It’s not your fault you overheard—“

“But I wanted to say I’m sorry about your friend. I know what it’s like to lose someone, and to be lied to for years. Maybe not both at the same time, but…” Which, well. It was a bit more complicated than either/or, he thought. But he also thought it’d be in poor taste to talk like their experiences were completely analogous to each other.

“I get it. Honestly, I’m starting to feel there’s not a point to being mad. He’s been dead for years now, and I always knew Dad was an asshole. It’s just now he’s an asshole for a slightly different reason.” 

It was easy to tell, though, that this had gone a long way towards lancing the infection that’d be festering on his relationship with his father for years now. He’d probably be hurt by the lie for a long time, but, moving forward, it was going to be for the best that he knew. Lord knew Alcide was a sucker for noble gestures. It was more than he’d probably ever expected from his dad, but Sam knew from experience that it was exactly what you hoped for from your parents when they fucked up big. Not just some admission that it was wrong to abandon their fifteen-year-old son when they found out he was different, not a laundry list of the usual excuses and explanations, but something out of a novel. Like maybe the real reason they had to leave was because aliens had abducted them years before and had finally caught up to them and they didn’t want him to get caught in the crossfire, and it was just cinematic bad luck that it happened the day after their son turned into a beagle and ran into the woods. Alcide had to know what a rare gift that was, that the truth ended up being something straight out of the fantasies people have when they’re young and the hurt is fresh and they want to think the best of the one who hurt them, despite it all. 

Which could have been wishful thinking on his part, but somehow he didn’t think so.

It kind of made him feel better to theorize that protecting homewrecking shapeshifters brought families together. 

~*~*~*~

Jackson’s contact arrived a few days later, looking more like a college senior than like someone he’d trust with bolt cutters so close to his neck. 

“I was kind of expecting another were,” Sam said. 

“I know you guys have this whole masquerade thing,” the girl said, “but I’m very discreet. I’d never out any of you without your consent.” 

“This is Nicole,” Jackson said. “She runs some vampire rights group.” When Sam still looked doubtful, he added, “Look, do you know any were or shifter who’d give her the time of day? Or any human who’d believe her?” 

“I guess not.” 

“Full disclosure,” Nicole said. “This isn’t my job or anything. It’s just that I could walk into an occult shop without every werewolf in the state knowing what I’m up to. I have a friend who’s an engineer and I got her to make me this kind of souped up ring cutter, and then I went to a pagan shop just to… You know what, it doesn’t matter. It’ll work.”

She was looking expectantly at him like he was supposed to have anything to say. “I just want this thing off,” he said. “I don’t care about the risks.” 

Her face fell a little, but she still stepped forward with the ring cutter. After so many weeks of waiting, it seemed to happen too quickly. She pushed his head back, slipped the cutting plate under the collar, and—

He felt it give way, but it didn’t register that it was really off until he heard it clatter to the ground and reached up to feel skin where, for months, there had been metal. 

“Okay,” Nicole said in her best I’m-being-supportive-now-this-is-a-safe-space voice. “Do you think you could shift now?” 

His stomach dropped when he realized he still couldn’t. His skin was crawling like it was covered in precisely a fuck ton of spiders, but nothing happened. He just stood there, looking like an idiot, with everyone staring at him like he was about to burst into either flames or tears.

“Maybe it just takes a minute,” Alcide said, far too quickly to be comforting. 

“I always wondered what would happen if I went too long without shifting,” Sam said. “I guess now I know.”

“No,” Nicole said. “No, you can’t think like that. I mean, you were stuck in that thing for months. It might just take some time for your abilities to reassert themselves. I don’t know a lot about shifters, but from the sounds of things neither do you, and—“ 

Wordlessly, he turned and went back to his trailer, leaving Alcide and Jackson to thank and apologize to Nicole. Part of him felt guilty, and part of him was pissed off, but mostly he felt numb. Hollowed out. Like he’d spent his whole life wading through bullshit because he was different, and now he’d been deprived of the perks of not being a normal human, while still being subjected to the many downsides. He was probably going to get killed because he was a shifter, and he couldn’t even shift. 

Nicole’s car left a half hour later, and he tuned out the quiet sounds of Alcide and Jackson moving about in the compound.

~*~*~*~

It was almost funny. When he’d first discovered that he wasn’t normal, all he’d wanted to do was for everything to stop. No more turning into a beagle on full moons like the world’s dumbest werewolf, no more parents leaving, no more living with the vague omnipresent fear that he’d wind up in some lab some day, being experimented on so that some scientist could discover the cure for cancer or something and later kids could be bored while reading in their history books about the unethical medical testing on supernatural creatures of the early 21st century. 

Back then, he’d wondered whether there was any way to go back to being normal. Like, maybe he could stop himself from shifting if he went and got something from those bullshit wicca stores that are full of patchouli-smelling hippies. Or maybe if he worked really hard not to shift for a really long time, eventually he wouldn’t get the urge to shift during the full moon, and eventually he wouldn’t even be able to shift anymore. Use it or lose it, right? He’d never been able to stop shifting for more than a month, always succumbing to the urge to shift during the next full moon, or shifting involuntarily when he got too upset about something. He wondered if his past self would have blocked his abilities earlier if he knew that all he had to do was wear some dorky silver jewelry for a few months. If his life would have been normal, better. No Maryann, no Joe Lee, no Luna. 

The worst part was that he felt like he was being an asshole about it. Like he should just accept it and stop ruining everyone else’s last days on earth with his moping. 

He went to bed early the night of the full moon, knowing that Alcide and Jackson would be shifting and not wanting the reminder. 

Except he couldn’t even have that to himself, because he woke up a little before midnight, skin itching the way it always did on the full moon. Thinking that it was an exceptionally dickish move for his brain to wake him up just for that, he rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. 

He managed only a light doze before he woke fully again, this time overheated and tangled in his sheets. He had no idea that he’d shifted until he’d had a second to breathe and he realized that the room was bigger than it had been when he went to bed and he wasn’t just tangled in his bedding, but also in his clothing. 

For a moment, he didn’t really believe it. Then he decided that even if he was dreaming or hallucinating, he might as well enjoy it, so he extricated himself from his bed, trotted to the door and nosed it open, and sprinted out into the night. The gate to the compound was open, so Alcide or Jackson must have been awake, but if either noticed him darting out, they didn’t try to stop him, though they were both faster than him. 

The smells and sounds of the night were so vivid he wondered how he’d managed to survive these past months without shifting, how anyone survived without hearing animals moving around in their dens or smelling each distinct plant whose leaves their footfalls bruised. The world had seemed dark and dead only a day before, but the darkness was alive again, not just something for werewolves or vampires or witches or whatever to hunt in. It was like how everything was eerily silent before a storm, but then afterwards the night came alive with a chorus of insects and tree frogs, deafeningly loud even to someone with a normal human’s hearing, and seeming to come from every direction at once. 

He ran, following the amphibious smells of rotting plant matter, until he reached a pond. It wasn’t as large as the one he’d frequented near Bon Temps, but that didn’t stop him from running full pelt into it. Normally he didn’t like swimming as a dog—neither collies nor beagles were exceptionally strong swimmers—but he paddled around for a few moments waiting for his heart to stop racing before he shifted back to human. The itch beneath his skin was gone, and he felt...

Mostly he was thinking of Daphne, and the scars on her back (which his own scars now bore a resemblance to) when she climbed out of the lake and onto the dock, and then of Maryann and the destruction that followed, and then of the mess he’d made of his third chance. Of Luna and Emma on the run somewhere, because he was stupid enough to think Marcus wouldn’t notice him sniffing around his ex, and then stupid enough to turn his back on him. But for once the pain felt like it might end someday. Like ripping off a bandaid or peeling off a scab or picking open a blister. It felt manageable, somehow, like he might actually find some way out of it, even though he knew logically that he was still in chest deep shit.

When he emerged from the lake, Alcide was waiting on the shore with a stack of clean clothes. 

“Thought you might not want to walk back naked,” he said by way of greeting.

“Are you kidding? I figured I wouldn’t go back at all, and just spend the whole night running.” Which was certainly an appealing prospect, but shifting after going so long without had been more tiring than he’d like to admit. He took the clothes and started pulling them on, not particularly caring that he’d probably have to change again when he got back, unless he wanted to go to sleep in wet clothes.

Alcide looked like he wanted to say something stupid. 

Sam decided to take one for the team. “Listen, you’ve done a lot for me.”

“No,” Alcide said. “No, don’t start with that—“

“Just let me finish. I know I’ve been… I might have seemed like I was being ungrateful. But I wasn’t. Believe me, I am _way_ too aware of the magnitude of what you’ve done for me. That was the problem. I’m grateful for what you did, and I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to pay you back, so I need you to know that.” 

“There’s nothing to pay back,” Alcide said, but not like he was trying to drag out the conversation. It was just a statement.

It was a humid night and his hair was dripping onto the back of his shirt, but unlike the time at the rest stop, he didn’t want to run.


	5. Chapter 5

Being able to shift again seemed to have broken a dam. Instead of ruminating on the futility of existence and the shitty hand life had dealt him, he started thinking about what he was going to do once everything was over. Started thinking about things like how he should repaint his trailer, and revamp the menu at Merlotte’s, and how tall Alcide was, and what kind of story he was going to make up to explain his absence and the new scars on his back and shoulder, and the way Alcide sounded when he’d just woken up, and… 

It was stupid to think that way. When you took out the shitty situation they were stuck in, they didn’t have much in common at all. What little he actually knew of the guy’s interests and life goals seemed starkly incompatible with his own. Sam’s endgame had always been to settle down, get married, have kids. Alcide seemed to want none of that. By all accounts, it was what had driven Debbie away from him.

What sucked was that he could understand the desire to not have kids, especially after seeing what Melinda and Joe Lee were like. Tommy’s life was fucked up because Joe Lee couldn’t stay off the bottle, but it was fucked up in the way it was fucked up because Melinda and Tommy were shifters. He’d probably justified it to himself by thinking that dogfighting was no big deal; it was unlikely that, had they been human, he’d have been able to justify throwing them into the ring. It took a more refined sort of sleaze to do that. 

And yeah, that was because Joe Lee was a piece of shit, but the more he learned about shifters and weres and vampires, the more depressing and dangerous the world looked. It was lonelier and more confusing, but he felt a lot safer back when he thought he was just some freak of nature. That there were not just more people like him but entire societies living under the humans’ noses made the secret feel a lot more fragile. Like they were all just one Youtube video away from being rounded up and poked and prodded by armed scientists for the rest of their lives for the good of humanity. And with vampires coming out of the coffin, it seemed like a matter of when, not if. Maybe bringing a shifter kid into the world wasn’t the best plan. 

But at the same time, he couldn’t live his life in fear like that. He’d been running his whole life, always looking over his shoulder for _something_ , always living with doubt and worry and the unknown. He’d decided a long time ago that if he wanted to be normal he had to act like it, and not just mope around as a dog, eating garbage and rolling in deer shit and feeling sorry for himself. Didn’t feel normal to give up on something he’d wanted since he was a kid just because he was scared of a hypothetical future where people like him spent their lives as lab rats.

Maybe it was really different for Alcide, and he’d really always felt the way he did. And maybe it was stupid to think about it at all, because it’s not like he and Alcide could have kids anyways. They could adopt. Or Hell, at this point he’d be happy running an animal rescue or something. Or—

Or he could stop being pathetic. Whatever he was feeling, it probably wasn’t requited. It was just his sad habit of falling in love with the first person to make eye contact with him after his last bout of heartbreak. 

… which was just another layer of sad and fucked up, because he hadn’t been dumped, and his last girlfriend was still alive. They’d separated for safety. Except even if they got this whole clusterfuck resolved, he didn’t think he’d be able to be with her again. It wasn’t her fault, what had happened, but he’d always associate her with it. Wasn’t sure if it was because he felt guilty for his own involvement, or because he knew she felt guilty for hers. But it would always be there and if anyone deserved a fresh start, it was Luna and Emma. They didn’t need him dragging them down the second they got out of a shitty situation. 

Of course, that thought process just left him feeling guilty for not being in love with her anymore, and guilty for feeling the way he did about Alcide despite everything. And guilty for contemplating a relationship to begin with when he had far bigger and more immediate problems on his plate. Even if he got to go home, he should be more worried about the bar than about planning out his retirement with someone he’d known for less than six months. 

He was never very good at reasoning away his feelings. And, in the aftermath of escaping captivity and getting the damn collar off, it was too easy to let himself nurse the infatuation for a little while.

~*~*~*~

They were all dragged forcibly back to the real world when Martha showed up one day.

After the requisite posturing, she said she wanted to help them take out J.D.

“What would be the point?” Alcide asked. “Take him out and then what? He’s got the whole pack on V; if he’s gone, one of them will just take over and everything will be the same.” 

“He doesn’t have me on V,” Martha said. “They didn’t bother to abjure me, so I can take over.” 

Something about the matter-of-fact way she said it made Sam think that maybe that wouldn’t be such a terrible outcome. She was Emma’s grandmother so he couldn’t be certain she wouldn’t develop a Marcus-like obsession with Luna and Emma, but maybe it was unfair to judge her by her son’s actions. It wasn’t like the guy was being strangled by her apron strings; from what little he knew of the history, it seemed that she disapproved of his behavior, but didn’t really have a leg to stand on, pack dynamics being what they were. 

“That could work,” Jackson said, also seeming to have gotten the feeling that she meant business. 

“You can’t be any worse than J.D.,” Sam offered. 

“I doubt anyone could be,” she snorted, but otherwise took their lukewarm support with grace. “Just tell me where my son is, and I’ll help you put that idiot down.”

Sam exchanged a glance with Alcide. It was what had gotten them into this mess to begin with, but it seemed like they’d gotten to the point where it almost didn’t matter anymore. They were all sure by now that she hadn’t planned a trap, and Martha on her own was significantly less likely to kill them over it than an entire pack hopped up on V. 

“We’ll take you,” Alcide said. 

It ended up being grosser than he’d expected.

Marcus had decomposed badly, but Martha didn’t even flinch once they’d fully unearthed him. Just closed her eyes and tilted her chin up a little, though whether she was trying to stop herself from crying or from shifting and tearing someone’s throat out was way beyond Sam. 

What wasn’t beyond him was the fact that Marcus’s body was too far gone to ascertain just who had been around when he died. Which was possibly partly the source of her frustration. He could empathize with her need for closure, but like fuck he was ever going to tell her what had actually happened. 

“Thank you for bringing me to him,” she finally said. “Once we get everything squared away with the pack, I’ll come back and take care of the funerary rites.” 

Sam cast what he hoped was a subtly questioning glance at Alcide, and Alcide just shook his head. The message was clear: _You don’t want to know._

~*~*~*~

They knew that they didn’t stand a chance against the whole pack, so it was fairly clear that one of them would have to beat J.D. in single combat. Of the four of them, Alcide probably had the best chance of taking him out, but he’d never be able to if J.D. was on V, which he was virtually guaranteed to be. 

Then, of course, there was the fact that Sam was liable to be worse than useless. Shifters were undeniably more versatile than weres, but he couldn’t shift into anything that was a real match for a were in a one-on-one fight. He’d get torn to shreds as a dog or owl, and his largest shift was the bull, which was obviously tougher than a dog but too slow to fight a were; it would be a great idea if he wanted to give them a free steak dinner. 

In the end, the planning took more time than getting the pack to show up. 

There was posturing, and attempts at banter (which Sam, from his vantage point in the nearby treeline, couldn’t hear) and eventually J.D. agreed to fight Alcide one-on-one.

As soon as J.D. shifted, Sam swooped down and tore his eyes out with his talons. 

He couldn’t regain altitude fast enough, and the plan fell apart from there. Instead of shifting back, J.D. jumped up and snapped, managing to get a mouthful of one of Sam’s wings. It wasn’t bad enough that Sam shifted back immediately, but it was all he could do to retreat the few yards back to the compound and land on top of one of the trailers, instead of heading to the treeline like he’d meant to. 

At that point it was apparent to anyone with half a brain that Alcide hadn’t gone into it intending to have a fair fight, which meant that a couple of the Shreveport weres shifted. Martha and Jackson moved in to hold them off until Alcide could finish off J.D., but it was messy, and having his eyes gouged out by an owl didn’t appear to have negatively impacted J.D. as much as they’d thought it would. 

For some time, Sam watched anxiously from his vantage point on top of the trailer, feeling equal parts guilty for not being in the thick of things and for dripping blood all over the trailer, but not wanting to be a liability. But when some of the still-human weres started shifting impatiently, Sam made up his mind to head back into the fray. The fight was going on too long; if it went on much longer, the rest of the pack might decide to stage their own intervention. He couldn’t fly with his arm—or wing, rather, not that the distinction really mattered—fucked up, but he fluttered off of the trailer and shifted to dog before barreling into J.D.’s side, quickly and unexpectedly enough that it knocked him over and gave Alcide the advantage. 

Alcide didn’t waste any more time. In an instant, his jaws were clamped around J.D.’s throat, and and instant later it was over. 

Martha told the pack that she’d be taking over and that their recent fuckup was so royal that they had no room to protest, then shifted, trotted over to J.D.’s body, and started eating. 

It felt surreal. Like it was happening too fast.

Sam wanted to leave so he didn’t have to watch the weres’ frankly gross burial rites, but he was too worried he’d fuck something up if he did so, so he sat down and tried his best not to think of it. But as was usually the case, his best wasn’t quite good enough. He’d wanted to see the guy dead as much as anyone else—probably more than most—and he’d thought that knowing in advance would cut back on the disgust, but it just made it that much worse. He wasn’t sure if it’d be better or worse if he was in human form for this, but figured that shifting right about then would be a terrible idea. 

When J.D.’s body was mostly bone and blood, the pack began filing away. Martha herself was the last the leave, and she didn’t look back as she broke into a sprint. 

Weres at their top speed rivaled vampires. They were gone as quickly as they’d arrived. 

Alcide and Jackson finally shifted back, and when Sam followed suit, the ground tilted dangerously beneath his feet, and he might have fallen had Alcide not grabbed his good arm to steady him. The unsteady ground was the least of his concerns; for the first time in months he didn’t have this thing hanging over his head, and he felt about three hundred pounds lighter, so light that if he shifted back to owl he could fly for miles even with a bum arm.

Instead of shifting again, he reached up and kissed Alcide. It was quick and almost chaste, but Alcide pulled away as if burnt. 

“Now’s not the best time for that,” Alcide said. “You’re not thinking straight.” 

“Yeah, I’m not thinking straight. I just closed one of the shittiest chapters of my life—which is saying something, the shit I’ve been through—and I need to feel grounded. I need to do something just because it feels right, not because it’s some—some heroic gesture or noble sacrifice for the greater good.” 

He took a step forward, but Alcide took him by the shoulders and held him at arm’s length. “No, I mean we just took on a pack of weres on V. Look at yourself. You can barely stand; you’re running on adrenaline. It wouldn’t be right.” 

It became a moot point a few moments later, when a pile of clothes came flying at their heads, courtesy of Jackson. 

“I’m hitting the showers,” he said. “You two should get yourselves cleaned up.”

He didn’t say it pointedly exactly, but he had a point. Sam’s arm was slowly dripping blood, and Alcide had a few deep scratches that really probably needed to be disinfected. 

By the time they were both cleaned up, the moment had passed. 

~*~*~*~

The ride back to Bon Temps was oddly solemn. He’d expected… Well, he wasn’t really sure what exactly he’d expected. It was safe to say that he hadn’t expected to go back in reasonably good physical and mental health, with little to no danger snapping at his heels. The last time he’d envisioned his homecoming had been when Alcide had first broken him out, which sounded terrible and made guilt join the party that his nerves were throwing in his stomach. He’d wanted to go home, sure, but he hadn’t considered what going home would actually be like. Absurdly, he almost felt as if he’d been playing hooky. Like he’d been off vacationing instead of trying to keep his personal drama from getting his friends hurt. As if his first inclination hadn’t been to go crawling back home to lick his wounds. 

But logic rarely had an effect on guilt, and he was glad enough to be going back home that the guilt didn’t manage to mar the day too much. 

They pulled into the familiar parking lot.

“Do you want me to go in with you?” Alcide asked. Then, immediately after, “forget I asked.”

“No, I, uh, appreciate that you asked. But I would like to go in by myself.” 

He got out of the truck and walked up to the front door. It was the same walk he’d made a thousand times before, but it felt… it felt like he could turn around and walk in the opposite direction and start a new life. He was more equipped to do so than the last time he’d had that thought. Except this time he didn’t want to. 

When he opened the door and stepped inside, the bar looked the same as it always had. It was mid-afternoon on a weekday, so the lunch rush was over and the dinner rush hadn’t yet started, and no one seemed particularly interested that the door had opened. Which was a good thing, really, because he just wanted to stand there for a second and… honestly, he wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted to do, but being swarmed by busybodies was pretty low priority. 

They hadn’t changed the music, or the decor, or—as far as anyone could tell in thirty seconds—the menu. The same people sat at the same tables, and as he stood there, he saw that the same Arlene carried the same trays. 

It took her a moment to notice him, and when she did she just about dropped the plates she was carrying. She set them on the nearest table and then barreled up to him, going on about everything that had happened and was he okay and what had happened to his arm and why didn’t he call to tell her he was showing up, because she would have thrown something together.

“I don’t want to make a big deal out of it,” he told her. “And I don’t want to talk about it, either.”

“Of course,” Arlene said.

But by that evening, it seemed that she’d managed to gather up everyone in Bon Temps, because the bar was packed, and a good half of the people there seemed surprised to learn that he was back. 

It was exhausting and overwhelming and annoying—because he was definitely the one who’d get stuck with the cleanup once the dust cleared—but somehow it was exactly what he’d needed. It felt right to go back to being irritated by something so totally normal, something that was unlikely to end in bodily harm except of the sort the stupendously drunk accidentally inflicted on themselves, and that would almost certainly not end with him being drained dry to fund someone’s V habit. 

Plus, it was funny as hell to watch Jane Bodehouse try (and fail) multiple times throughout the night to get Alcide to dance with her.

~*~*~*~

Sam dropped into the recliner in his office, only to regret it immediately when he remembered Luna’s comment about how hard it was to seduce him while sitting in it. And regretted the regret shortly after when he realized what the implication of that regret was. He could feel himself sinking unflatteringly into the chair like someone’s dull third cousin after Thanksgiving dinner, and—absurdly—felt panic beginning to bubble in the pit of his stomach. 

It struck him that they were alone for the first time since the drive to Bon Temps, and he thought it was incredible just how quickly he could go from feeling pleasantly normal to feeling like the world’s biggest asshole. 

“I should get going,” Alcide said. “It’s getting late, and you seem to be settling in just fine, so…” 

“Are you okay to drive?” 

“I don’t think I have anything to worry about on that front.” 

“I guess you wouldn’t.”

They both held still, not making eye contact, neither apparently sure how to end the conversation. There was no real reason for them to stick together now; it wasn’t like they lived close enough to each other to _hang out_ like normal people, and Sam would rather be dead than learn how to text, and suspected Alcide felt the same way. The only reason why Alcide wouldn’t get into his truck and drive off was the one really good one, but Sam didn’t want to be the one to open that can of worms, and the longer the awkward silence stretched out, the more certain he was that Alcide wasn’t going to be the one to open it either.

“You could stay the night,” he blurted out finally. It felt clunky and awful, but it cut through the tension in the room.

“I wouldn’t want to impose,” Alcide said. 

“I imposed on you for weeks. It’s the least I could do.” 

Sam had thought that they could talk once they were alone, but once he was in his own home—which was the same as it ever was, except that it needed a good dusting—he was too tired to do anything but put a spare blanket and pillow on the couch before retreating to his bedroom. 

It was surprisingly hard to fall asleep in his own bed. The sheets were a little stale and dusty from having sat unmaintained for months, his arm ached no matter how much he tossed and turned, and his pillow, which before had been comfortably broken in, now felt lumpy and unsupportive. It wasn’t until he heard Alcide’s breathing slow into sleep that he was able to drift off. 

~*~*~*~

The next morning was somewhat disconcerting. It was weird to wake up in his own bed, in a house that smelled like himself instead of like werewolves, surrounded by familiar woods and hearing familiar birdsong. 

What somehow wasn’t weird was walking out towards the kitchen to see Alcide asleep on the couch, looking cramped and uncomfortable. 

He decided to make breakfast, which was a complicated enough diversion for awhile, but started thinking too much again by the time he was done cooking the bacon.

It felt like something was slipping away. Like that story about the dog that lost its bone because it tried to steal from its own reflection in the river. He had his life in Bon Temps, and then he had… whatever his life had been when he was living in Alcide’s father’s trailer. If you try to have both, you end up with nothing. Alcide had a business of his own, a life of his own. Helping Sam out had been a detour. Something he did to alleviate his misplaced guilt over his involvement in the series of events that led up to Sam being kidnapped by white trash werewolves. If feelings had developed, it was just the stress of the situation or pity or… There were a million things it could be besides what Sam wanted it to be.

He cracked an egg into the frying pan with somewhat more force than was strictly needed, then cursed somewhat more loudly than he’d intended to when the egg ended up covered in a pulverized mess of shell, the broken yolk cheerfully forging a path out of the white and into the pan. 

As he debated whether to try and pick the shell out or to just scrape the pan out into the garbage and start fresh, Alcide emerged from his undersized cocoon on the couch. 

“I’m not usually a terrible cook,” Sam said when Alcide saw the mess in the frying pan, which was starting to burn. “It’s just…” He ended up not actually saying what it just was, because the only excuse he could come up with besides the truth was that he was hungover, and they both knew that Sam had had maybe two beers the night before, tops. 

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Alcide said as Sam scraped out the pan. “I’m not a big fan of eggs, anyways.”

“Well, that’s good, because I think I’m actually out.” Just because a few things had gone right recently didn’t erase his tendency to fuck things up, he guessed. “At least the bacon isn’t burnt.” 

“It’s really not a big deal. You didn’t have to cook.” 

He really, really did, but that was another thing there was no plausible excuse for. “You know what,” he said finally, “I’m starting to feel like a real asshole, so if this is too awkward, please feel free to—“ 

He was cut off by Alcide’s mouth pressing against his, no slower than the one he himself had given after they’d neutralized the Shreveport pack, but significantly less chaste. 

When they parted, the air in the room seemed to have gotten significantly thinner. That… wasn’t exactly what he’d been about to say Alcide could feel free to do, but it got the job done.

“Listen, it’s a full moon tonight, and I know you probably wanted to hang out with your dad, but I thought maybe we could—“ 

Alcide kissed him again instead of answering, lingering this time, which he supposed was as good of an answer as any.


End file.
